Junkyard Derby Video 2009

Pirates AND "space pirates from space" competing in the same UC San Diego student competition. That's right...and there is so much more to Junkyard Derby, a student event in which students build cars from junk and then race them down a hill on campus.

Congratulations to the AIAA team, which won first place. The silver shuttle/plane-like car was driven by Colin Sheredy, an undergrad from the mechanical and aerospace engineering department.




There are photos below and on the Calit2 photostream.

Junkyard Derby 2009 Photos

Technology for Early-Cancer Diagnosis Leads Bioengineering Grad Student to Many Prizes and a Startup Company

Raj Krishnan is a bioengineering graduate student leading a research project that may change the way cancer is diagnosed. His goal is to create new tools that catch cancer at its very earliest stages by identifying secondary biomarkers that are present long before tumors appear or other biomakers are evident.

In 2009, Krishnan has won three major University of California awards for his research. He is also heading up a startup company that aims to make this technology available to the world, where it may help people catch cancer earlier...and when it comes to cancer diagnsis, earlier is certainly better.

Robotic Mice in a Maze

A couple of Fridays ago, I spent the afternoon with five of the Jacobs School undergrads who make up the UC San Diego MicroMouse team. They were deep into prep mode because the following morning, their robotic mouse had to be ready to solve a maze with no help from humans.

Of course there were midterms to be preparing for, and all the usual Friday afternoon distractions on a college campus, but none of that mattered. Software bugs had to be found and fixed. The maze had to be cleaned. And there was even another algorithm to be implemented.

If you have five minutes, watch the video embedded below [high rez YouTube version here] (or read the full story). I hope it gives you a glimpse of team engineering in action.



The students made the sofa in the background from the recycled wood from the deck they built as a level construction platform for the maze.



The fireworks (above) started when students cut nails for the maze.

Junkyard Derby is this Week!

Jacobs School engineering students will transform junk into racecars this week at UC San Diego. The three-day marathon starts on Wednesday afternoon with the kick-off BBQ and junk-dash. It's a lot of fun to watch students diving into a pile of junk in search of that perfect racecar part. Grocery carts are always appealing...though I don't know how well the actually work in the end.

After two nights of furious building, the students race their junk cars down Peterson Hill, near the UC San Diego library.

Junkyard Derby 2009 Schedule:

Wednesday, May 6
Kickoff Event and BBQ :: 5-6pm

Build Time :: Junkyard open from 7pm-2am

Thursday, May 7

Build Day :: Junkyard open from 8am-2am

Friday, May 8
Race Day :: 10:30am-3pm at Peterson Hill

Junkyard Derby official rules

Junkyard Derby is a great event run by TESC (Triton Engineering Student Council) at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering

Surf's Up: Physics of Surfing

photo credit: Sean Masterson / For The Times

"A break from classes to learn how waves break."

That's the headline for a Los Angeles Times story by Tony Perry on the Physics of Surfing freshman seminar co-taught by Stefan Llewellyn Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from the Jacobs School and David Sandwell, professor of geophysics at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Here is a story and video about the physics of surfing class from UC San Diego written by Ioana Patringenaru.

ABC = Amazon Belongie Connection

At least, that's one way to look at it. Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc Amazon announced "AWS in Education," a set of programs that enable the academic community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching and research.

Here is a quote from computer science professor Serge Belongie from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

“The grant we have received from the AWS in Education program will dramatically increase the reach of my student group's collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to develop distributed assistive computer vision technology for the visually impaired,” said Serge Belongie, Associate Professor at the University of California in San Diego.

Read more about this vision technology here.